Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer

ABOUT US - At Sierra, we’re creating a platform to help businesses build better, more human customer experiences with AI. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices in Atlanta, New York, London, Paris, Madrid, Munich, Singapore, Japan, and Sydney. - We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and Family. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do. - Our co-founders are Bret Taylor https://www.linkedin.com/in/brettaylor/ and Clay Bavor https://www.linkedin.com/in/claybavor/. Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce (which had acquired the company he founded, Quip) and CTO of Facebook. Bret was also one of Google's earliest product managers and co-creator of Google Maps. Before founding Sierra, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. Earlier, he started and led Google’s AR/VR effort, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Before that, Clay led the product and design teams for Google Workspace.  WHAT YOU’LL DO As a Forward Deployed Infrastructure Engineer at Sierra, and a founding member of this function, you will own the end-to-end lifecycle of customer deployments, while helping define how Sierra’s AI platform is deployed and operated across enterprise environments. You'll work directly with enterprise customers to architect, deploy, upgrade, and manage Sierra's AI platform infrastructure — ensuring every deployment meets their security, compliance, and operational requirements. In addition, you’ll establish the standards, tooling, and processes that make deployments scalable and repeatable, and partner cross-functionally with Engineering, Product, Sales, and Customer Success. This role will define how Sierra scales some of its most complex customer engagements. - Own deployment architecture conversations and execution — designing and implementing deployment strategies across customer environments, including VPC configuration, permissioning, networking, and infrastructure provisioning. - Manage the full infrastructure lifecycle for some of Sierra’s most critical customers: initial deployment, ongoing upgrades, scaling, and incident support. - Develop and maintain deployment runbooks, upgrade procedures, and automation tooling to make operations repeatable and reliable. - Partner with engineering teams to ensure Sierra's platform is deployable and operable across diverse customer requirements. - Work with customers' platform engineering, security, and DevOps teams to navigate their infrastructure constraints and compliance requirements. - Collaborate with Sales and Customer Success to scope infrastructure requirements during pre-sales and onboarding, translating customer needs into concrete deployment plans. WHAT YOU'LL BRING - 4+ years of experience in infrastructure, DevOps, platform engineering, or solutions architecture roles — with significant time spent on customer-facing deployment work. - Deep experience with AWS services, Terraform, container orchestration, and cloud networking (VPCs, IAM, DNS, load balancing). - Track record of managing deployments in customer-owned cloud environments, including navigating security reviews, compliance requirements, and change management processes. - Ability to navigate ambiguity with enterprise stakeholders — from platform engineers to CISOs — and turn infrastructure conversations into actionable deployment plans. - Strong operational instincts: you think about upgrades, rollbacks, monitoring, and failure modes from the start, not as an afterthought. - Comfortable working in a fast-moving environment and collaborating across engineering, product, and go-to-market teams. - Degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent professional experience. EVEN BETTER… - Hands-on experience with Go services, GraphQL APIs, or LLM infrastructure in production environments. - Past experience at an early-stage company where you built deployment operations, playbooks, and tooling. - Familiarity with observability and incident management in distributed systems (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or similar). - Experience with CI/CD pipeline design, deployment automation, or infrastructure self-service tooling for enterprise customers. OUR VALUES - Trust: We build trust with our customers with our accountability, empathy, quality, and responsiveness. We build trust in AI by making it more accessible, safe, and useful. We build trust with each other by showing up for each other professionally and personally, creating an environment that enables all of us to do our best work. - Customer Obsession: We deeply understand our customers’ business goals and relentlessly focus on driving outcomes, not just technical milestones. Everyo